Stitching to Mordor

Greetings all my fellow crafty people. I took a long hiatus from writing due to a plethora of Real Life things that needed attention and a couple Fake Life things that brought me down quite a ways. Something had to give and unfortunately, it was my blogging. My stitchy bug has been on vacation, due mostly I think to how an activity that I was enjoying so much was decimated by a few vindictive individuals.

Back at the end of April, the Harry Potter group imploded. This was for a lot of reasons, and I did my best to stay out of it, but I was hit with backlash due to being in Slytherin House and being an active contributing member. I ended up leaving the group entirely. Some of us followed one of our fearless leaders to a new Facebook Group that is called The Stitchy Quest to Destroy the One Ring. We are reading the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and participating in a series of events that relate. It's a cooperative rather than a competitive setup, and I think that will prevent a similar disaster from striking. I haven't done any of the short term events yet but I'm still tracking my stitches for the Stitching to Mordor event. 

For Stitching to Mordor, we have a spreadsheet that describes each leg of the Journey for all the Lord of the Rings Books and we've set it to 20 stitches per mile. Which would mean that once I complete the whole things, in say 5 or 6 years, I'll have stitched over 150,000 stitches. Which is a pretty cool way to track things. I'm still on my way along the first leg of the journey, trying to get my reluctant hobbit behind to Rivendell. 

So here's my Slytherin House Crest, which has been my primary stitching project. As someone who has identified as Gryffindor for most of my life, I'm now a Slytherclaw, so the Ravenclaw crest will be next.

One of the cooler things about the LOTR group is that there's also a bunch of yarn artists and we are collaborating to crochet and knit our way to Mordor as well. It's a running total for group effort, so I'm just reporting yardage when I finish a skein and it's added to the group total. I'd like to introduce you to my Phoenix CAL by Hooked on Sunshine. This a free CAL until the last part is released in a couple of weeks, so head over to Hooked on Sunshine and grab it while it's free - and don't forget to download the final parts when they're released, before it becomes paid.

I'm using Lion Brand Mandala in Gnome for this project. I think I have 10 cakes so I'm hoping to get the whole thing done with what I have on hand.

In other news, Ragnarok has come and gone this year and brought with it a huge number of sewing projects. I actually managed quite a bit, most of which I didn't take pictures of, but this dress was the crowning achievement and it took four tries before I finally got it finished. It was a wedding present for a friend who was married in May.

That's about it for me these days. I hope to blog a little more often, if only because I like having a record of what I've been up to. Happy stitching all!